Nights of Zhivago
BY DENNIS HINRICHSEN
for my mother
I carry your loneliness inside me like a horse, one
of those trotters from Zhivago, a movie
you saw three nights running
when I was young
and you were young and there was still
a future
in Super Panavision.
You loved the scalar immensity, Sharif’s
Egyptian eyes burning white Russian
in a dream
of perfect marriage.
Who could blame you? Husband in another town,
setting up
the next move, home
only weekends. The American Dream:
ranch house with leaky basement,
sump pump
like an artificial heart on a stem.
Children: burning out their lives like orphans.
Night 1: you bought us
popcorn so we would quiet
and the gray of the screen
*
could become the gray of your mind
exploding
in fur and pink: skeletal Chaplin.
She had your body, wisp
of a girl
with girlish hips, but awash
in glamour, wealth. She wins
Zhivago it seems. You go a second time
to be certain.
Take a friend
a blond like Lara,
whose husband—
the rumor went—embezzled,
slept around, slapped
her now and then. I think it helped,
Night 2,
with the brute,
Victor Ipolitovich Komarovsky,
and Lara’s
deeper, truer
loneliness. Shape of a woman
like the shape of a horse.
Ridden,
put aside wet. You hated
Steiger forever after that. Begrudged
him
even the Oscar. Was he
*
the Husband?
The man from across the street?
Our father?
The Zhivago children the four
snot-nosed kids you left at home—
with whom?—
me? When you returned, a glass
was broken, we were bloodied,
fighting. You threatened to leave—
I threw you
the keys—you stayed.
Night 3: you went alone.
Eased
into that slow section—
*
Lara helping Zhivago—
you, too, were a nurse. They
fall
in love, beautifully,
without touching. Mend
and stitch
the wounded.
And then the horse again—
Varykino, Yuriatin. Zhivago
galloping
wife to lover,
his passion abducted, con-
scripted.
His trudging back in snow.
Varykino again. Lara
*
again. It’s really a house in Spain
filled with beeswax,
the cold an illusion, Hollywood lighting
bathing Christie’s blue eyes (yours
were brown)
as Christie as Lara lounged,
as you as Lara lounged, while
Zhivago penned the poems. To the adored.
He has his back
to her—a candle rages—
she is sleeping. I watch it three nights
running
before I understand the scene.
Then l know—it is you who is awake—
by a strange alchemy—you as Zhivago—
the un-adored,
the un-beloved, become the lover.
The unending monologues when I was home
explain it,
the weekly phone calls,
*
word and word and word,
when I moved away, the tapes
of your singing—at church,
with Streisand—the letters
with profiles of Indian doctors you loved,
their skin
as dark as Sharif’s
but with sharper knives. How you
let them cut you again and again,
scalpel as poem
and dear heart, are you breathing,
what can I do to ease the pain?
40 years of this.
A staggering array of scars and drugs.
Ankle, knee, heart, gut.
The writings, the tapes, the “poems”—
Dolores’s poems—
I stored in a box until—
because I am your coltish son—I trashed.
For which
I am broken-hearted, late adoring, yours
after all, sentenced to a few crude scenes.
